Jon Goff explains why the ESAS windmill is worth a tilt:

How are we going to find investors willing risk the money to develop on-orbit propellant transfer when they’re being told that multi-launch architectures are too unreliable? That the best way to get back to the moon is building Ares I and Ares V, and that any EELV or light launcher based system would require too many launches to be practical?

Who’s going to fund a commercial lunar transportation system if we’ve abandoned the field to those who claim the only way you can do lunar transportation is using HLVs?

Ideas matter.

Honestly, as much as I would like to see NASA change to a more commercial aligned position, I don’t really think it is likely to happen. But if we can sway the conventional wisdom that these other, more commercial approaches really are not only technically feasible, but technically and economically superior, it doesn’t really matter. In the end, NASA will do what NASA will do, but if we can convince potential investors that there really are more cost effective ways of doing things, it will have been worth it.

But if we abandon the field of ideas, and stick to our knitting, we’re setting ourselves seriously up for failure.

It’s impossible to even begin to estimate the staggering amount of damage that has been done over the past decades to our prospects of opening space, by NASA-driven public perceptions about the difficulty of doing various things in space, in terms of decimating investment prospects. The false lessons from Apollo, the Shuttle and ISS continue to haunt us today, and this current irrational fear of orbital operations just continues that destructive legacy, in my opinion.